1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a management system such as an Internet data center (hereinafter referred to as IDC) or the like, a management program, and a management method, for managing a plurality of computers and a plurality of pieces of software allocated to the computers.
2. Description of Related Art
In recent years, environmental problems such as global warming have been increasingly serious, and companies and public offices are obliged to urgently institute environmental protection measures such as reduction of power consumption. Particularly, in a computer center such as IDC in which a plurality of computers composed of pieces of hardware are provided, when a plurality of computers are operating, electric power consumed for cooling down the plurality of computers accounts for a considerable part of the entire electric power consumed, and its ratio sometimes reaches approximately 40%. Therefore, reduction of the power consumption for the cooling is demanded.
In IDC, pieces of software for executing predetermined operations are allocated to a plurality of computers. In a utility computing data center, to which computer which software is allocated is controlled dynamically according to needs. For example, if software for performing high-volume processing is allocated to a certain computer, the operation amount of the computer increases. With this increase in the operation amount, the amount of heat radiated from the computer also increases. As a result, failures due to heat emission by the computer could possibly occur.
To prevent such failures due to such heat emission, it is necessary to keep low the temperature of the space where the computer is disposed, by using an air conditioner, for instance. However, to keep the temperature of the space low, a large amount of electric power is needed for operating the air conditioner. This consequently makes it difficult to reduce the power consumption.
Conventionally, as a measure to cope with heat radiated by a computer, an information processing device that executes an operation such as stopping the program executed by using the computer when a rise of temperature of the computer is detected has been proposed by, for example, JP 2005-316764A. This makes it possible to control heat emission of a computer and save energy for the cooling.